By now, you know the stats: Each year, over one-third of our food produced is wasted.
That translates to about $285 billion (or 54 million tons) worth of food each year in the US alone. That’s more than a quarter trillion dollars worth of food, produced from or with scarce inputs like water, land and animals that are slaughtered — food that won’t end up on the plates of people who go hungry every day. Food that will be tossed aside and become trash.
It’s a big problem, but the good news is there’s a huge movement across the food system to find innovative ways to reduce the amount of food waste. One of the strongest voices at the center of this movement is ReFED, a US-based non-profit organization dedicated to ending the food waste crisis. ReFED’s efforts to create awareness through a data-driven approach to catalyze change is something we’ve covered here at The Spoon and one of the reasons we’re big fans of what they do.
All of which is to say, when we decided to do an event focused on highlighting innovation in reducing food waste, ReFED was our first choice for a partnership.
Today we’re excited to announce the event and share details with the food tech community.
The Food Waste Insights + Innovation Forum is a free-to-attend half-day virtual event on June 16th from 9 AM to 1 PM PT (12 PM to 4 PM ET) and will feature some of the leading companies and organizations. We’ll dive into their work and progress in building a less wasteful food system and hear about how they overcame barriers through leveraging innovation.
We’ll hear from leaders within companies like The Wonderful Company and Hellmann’s about innovative approaches they’ve taken to reducing food waste. We’ll talk to investors like S2G Ventures and Cultivian Sandbox about the ways in which capital can be deployed to scale impactful solutions. Finally, we’ll also hear from innovators like Spoiler Alert and Smoketown building new technologies and systems to reduce food waste.
We’ll also highlight emerging innovators chosen by ReFED and The Spoon who are creating technology-driven solutions to reduce waste across the food system, whether that’s at the farm, in the supply chain, at the restaurant or grocery store or in our own fridges.
If you have ideas you want to share about how to reduce food waste, are looking for a new partner to help supercharge your own company’s efforts in this area, or just want to learn more about this growing movement, register today for this half-day event on June 16th (it’s free!, thanks in part to our sponsors Google and FoodX Technologies).
We’ll be keeping you updated over the next several weeks as more speakers are added and the full agenda is released. In the meantime, reserve your ticket today, and get ready to help us further the conversation around how we can innovate to fight food waste.
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